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There are many ways to make money online without spending any money.
Making money online used to much need you to have your own Website, products to sell & some promotion savvy. But a new generation of dot-coms have arisen that will pay you for what you know & who you know without you having to be a web designer or a promotion genius.

But it is hard to tell hype from the real deal. I did a search on “make money online” & “making money online”, & much of the information out there is promoting various infoproducts, mostly about Web promotion. I see why people sometimes ask, “Is someone making money online besides Web promotion experts?”

So I put together a list of business opportunities with legitimate companies that:

* Pay funds, not points towards rewards or a chance to win money
* Don’t need you to have your own Web domain or your own products
* Don’t involve any hard-selling
* Are not promoting more Web promotion
* Give a nice return on your time investment

In the interest of objectivity, none of the links below are affiliate links, & none of them have paid or provided any other consideration for their presence here. These are legitimate companies with business models that let you get paid for a wide range of activities.

Help friends find better jobs.

Sites like ReferEarns, Zyoin, Who Do You Know For Dough?, Bohire & WiseStepp connect employers with prospective employees, lots of of whom are already employed & not actively job-hunting, by networking – the people who know these qualified candidates. Rewards for referring a candidate who gets hired range from $50 on up to several thousand dollars – not chump modify. If you know a lot of job-seekers (& who doesn’t these days?), this is a great way to break in to the recruiting business with no overhead.

Connect suppliers with buyers.

Referral fees are a common practice in business, but they haven’t been used much in online networking sites because there was no way to track them. Sites like Salesconx, InnerSell & uRefer now provide that. Vendors set the referral fees they are willing to pay (& for what), & when the transaction happens, you get paid. uRefer also allows merchants to set up referral programs for introductions & meetings, as well as transactions.

A growing number of sites will pay for your articles or blog posts. Associated Content & Helium will “pay for performance” based on page views for anything you need to write about. Articles on specific topics they are looking for can earn direct payments up to about $200. The rates are probably low for established writers, but if you are trying to break in to the field & have time on your hands, they are a great way to start. Also, a lot of companies are looking for part-time bloggers. They may pay per post or on a steady contract. Our Weblogs Guide posts blogging jobs every week in the forum.

Write.

Start your own blog.

You don’t must have your own Website, or install blogging application, or even figure out how to set up the promotion. At Blogger you can set up a blog for free in less than two minutes without knowing a thing about web design, & Blogger even automates setting up Google AdSense so you can make money off your blog by displaying ads & getting paid when people click on the ads. To make even more money from it, set up an affiliate program (see below) for books, music, etc., & insert your affiliate links whenever you refer to those items. You’ll must receive a lot of traffic to become a six-figure blogger, but pick an interesting topic, write well, tell all your friends, & you are off to a nice start.

Generate topical resource hubs.

Related: Monetizing Your Blog

Promote other people’s products.

Are you an expert on a particular niche topic? Can you put together an overview of the topic & assemble a number of the best resources on the topic from around the web? Then you can generate topical hubs & get paid through sites like Squidoo, HugPages & Google Knol. Payments are based on a combination of ad revenue & affiliate fees. You’ll get higher rates doing it on your own, but these sites have a built-in supply of traffic & tools to make content creation less difficult.

If you already have a Website or a blog, look for vendors that offer related but non-competing products & see if they have an affiliate program. Stick to familiar products & brands – they are less difficult to sell. To promote those products:

* Place simple text or graphical ads in appropriate places on your site
* Include links to purchase products you review or recommend in a blog, discussion forum or mailing list you control
* Generate a dedicated sales page or Website to promote a particular product

They all work – it depends on how much time you must spend on it & your level of expertise with Web design & promotion.

Related: How to Make Money on the Web With an Amazon.com Affiliate Site

Microstock photography.

You don’t must be a professional photographer to sell your photos for money. People are constantly in need of stock photography for web-sites, presentations, brochures & so on, & are willing to pay for the right picture. People generally search for images on stock photography sites by keywords, not by photographer, so you have the same chance as someone else of having your picture picked. be careful that you don’t have images of trademarked brands, copyrighted art or people’s faces that are readily identifiable (unless you have a model release), but anything else is fair game, & I promise – you’d be amazed what people need pics of, so don’t make any assumptions. If it is a decent photo, upload it. Some sites to get you started include Fotolia, ShutterStock, Dreamstime & iStockphoto. The great thing about this is that it is truly “set it & forget it”.

The above list is by no means comprehensive, but it highlights a number of the new & interesting ways to make money online without investing any money, without having a product of your own, & without having expert sales & promotion skills. Most of all, unlike taking surveys or getting paid to read e-mail, the potential return on your time investment is substantial.